or Japan.
The vicious racism and antisemitism and homophobia and assorted other bigotries of the Nazis are fully the fault of the Nazis. But blame is unlimited. Giving it to someone does not take it away from anyone else. It’s hard to know how the laws stripping Jews of rights would have been developed in Germany without the American model. It’s easy to grasp that the United States did not need to create that model, that it could have done better and can do better in the future. As I write this, California is using prisoners to fight forest fires, paying them $1 an hour, and public scandals over police murders of black men are frequent occurrences.
As racist as the U.S. was prior to WWII, it was made more racist by WWII -- something that happens with each major war. In 2018, Frontline PBS and ProPublica reporter A. C. Thompson produced a film called “Documenting Hate: New American Nazis,” in which Thompson interviewed professor Kathleen Belew, author of Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement in Paramilitary America.122
KATHLEEN BELEW: One thing to understand is that throughout American history there’s always a correlation between the aftermath of warfare and this kind of vigilante and revolutionary white power violence. So if you look, for instance, at the surges in Ku Klux Klan membership, they align more consistently with the return of veterans from combat and the aftermath of war than they do with anti-immigration, populism, economic hardship or any of the other factors that historians have typically used to explain them. Nationalist fervor, populist movements—those are all worse predictors than the aftermath of war.
A. C. THOMPSON: Postwar periods tend to correspond then with an upsurge in white power, white supremacist activity?
KATHLEEN BELEW: Always. Yes.
A. C. THOMPSON: Wow.
A. C. THOMPSON: Belew outlines a long history of military men who became key figures in the white power movement: George Lincoln Rockwell, World War II veteran and founder of the American Nazi Party; Richard Butler, World War II veteran and founder of the Aryan Nations; Louis Beam, Vietnam veteran and grand dragon of the KKK; Timothy McVeigh, Gulf War veteran and Oklahoma City bomber.
KATHLEEN BELEW: It’s important to remember, too, that returning veterans that join this movement, and active-duty troops, we’re talking about a tiny, not even statistically significant, percentage of veterans. But within this movement, those people who did serve are playing an enormously important role in instruction of weapons, in creating paramilitary activist mentality and training.
It’s not hard to understand how wars feed off racism and feed back into it. William Halsey, who commanded the United States’ naval forces in the South Pacific during WWII, thought of his mission as “Kill Japs, kill Japs, kill more Japs,” and had vowed that when the war was over, the Japanese language would be spoken only in hell.123 LIFE magazine showed a picture of a Japanese person burning to death and commented: “This is the only way.”124 Dr. Seuss, whose The Butter Battle Book depicts war as idiocy, and who thought child refugees should be saved, churned out racist war propaganda, including a cartoon depicting Germans and Japanese as insects being sprayed with insecticide by Uncle Sam,125 and another with the caption “Slap that Jap! Bugswatters cost money!”126
A U.S. Army poll in 1943 found that roughly half of all GIs believed it would be necessary to kill every Japanese on earth.127 War correspondent Edgar L. Jones wrote in the February 1946 Atlantic Monthly, “What kind of war do civilians suppose we fought anyway? We shot prisoners in cold blood, wiped out hospitals, strafed lifeboats, killed or mistreated enemy civilians, finished off the enemy wounded, tossed the dying into a hole with the dead, and in the Pacific boiled flesh off enemy skulls to make table ornaments for sweethearts, or carved their bones into letter openers.”128
In 1942, with the assistance of the Census Bureau, the United States locked up 110,000 Japanese Americans and Japanese in various internment camps, primarily on the West Coast, where they were identified by numbers rather than names. This action, taken by President Roosevelt, was supported two years later by the U.S. Supreme Court.129
In 1943 off-duty white U.S. troops attacked Latinos and African Americans in Los Angeles’ “zoot suit riots,” stripping and beating them in the streets in a manner that would likely have made Hitler proud. The Los Angeles City Council, in a remarkable effort to blame the victims, responded by banning the style of clothing worn by Mexican immigrants called the zoot suit.130
When U.S. troops were crammed onto the Queen Mary in 1945 headed for the European war, blacks were kept apart from whites and stowed in the depths of the ship near the engine room, as far as possible from fresh air, in the same location in which blacks had been brought to America from Africa centuries before.131
African American soldiers who survived World War II could not legally return home to many parts of the United States if they had married white women overseas. Black soldiers who returned to the Southern United States sometimes found themselves required to sit in the back of streetcars so that Nazi prisoners of war could sit in the front.132 White soldiers who had married Asians were up against the same anti-miscegenation laws in 15 states.
Whatever the United States fought WWII for -- and we’ve seen that it wasn’t to save the Jews -- it surely wasn’t to oppose any sort of racist injustice. Nor was it to put an end to the imperial conquest of territory.
During World War II the U.S. Navy seized the small Hawaiian island of Koho’alawe for a weapons testing range and ordered its inhabitants to leave. The island has been devastated. In 1942, the U.S. Navy displaced Aleutian Islanders. President Harry Truman made up his mind that the 170 native inhabitants of Bikini Atoll had no right to their island in 1946. He had them evicted and dumped as refugees on other islands without means of support. In the coming years, the United States would remove 147 people from Enewetak Atoll and all the people on Lib Island. U.S. atomic and hydrogen bomb testing rendered various depopulated and still-populated islands uninhabitable, leading to further displacements. Up through the 1960s, the U.S. military displaced hundreds of people from Kwajalein Atoll. A super-densely populated ghetto was created on Ebeye.
Also during WWII, the United States evicted all native people, but not whites, from their homes in the Aleutian Islands of Alaska, and put them into camps lacking food, water, or basic hygiene. Ten percent of them died.133 In Hawaii, the U.S. government declined to remove the workforce desired by wealthy, white plantation owners, but did impose martial law and lock up 2,000 people of Japanese descent.134
On Vieques, off Puerto Rico, the U.S. Navy displaced thousands of inhabitants between 1941 and 1947, announced plans to evict the remaining 8,000 in 1961, but was forced to back off and -- in 2003 -- to stop bombing the island. On nearby Culebra, the Navy displaced thousands between 1948 and 1950 and attempted to remove those remaining up through the 1970s.135
Beginning during World War II but continuing right through the 1950s, the U.S. military displaced a quarter million Okinawans, or half the population, from their land, forcing people into refugee camps and shipping thousands of them off to Bolivia -- where land and money were promised but not delivered.136
In 1953, the United States made a deal with Denmark to remove 150 Inughuit people from Thule, Greenland, giving them four days to get out or face bulldozers. They are being denied the right to return.137
Between 1968 and 1973, the United States and Great Britain exiled all 1,500 to 2,000 inhabitants of Diego Garcia, rounding people up and forcing them onto boats while killing their dogs in a gas chamber and seizing possession of their entire homeland for the use of the U.S. military. They are being denied the right to return.138
When I say that WWII was not fought to save the Jews or to oppose racism or imperialism, I mean both that the U.S. government was not so motivated and that the U.S. public and U.S. recruits were not so motivated. The public actually had very little say in the matter. President Franklin Roosevelt had blocked passage of the Ludlow Amendment that would have put the decision to go to war to a public vote. As a result, the public got no vote and did not even have to be persuaded of a justification. As Jacques R. Pauwels puts it in The Myth of the Good War,